Turning Pages: The dubious appeal of self-help books

By Jane Sullivan

2 February 2018 — 12:16pm

Can you believe there's a book that is loved by both Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump? It's Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki.

I'm not sure how reliable that information is, given that Trump is rumoured to be a non-reader. But it shows how pervasive and universal is the influence of the self-help book. Kiyosaki's manual on how to teach your kids about money and build your own financial wealth and independence to boot was first self-published in 1997, then picked up by a major publisher, went on to bestseller-dom, and is still hugely popular.

Blame Dale Carnegie for starting it all in 1939 with his famous tome How to Win Friends and Influence People, now updated for the digital age. Other self-help classics – if you can call them that – include Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking and Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. President Clinton was so taken with Covey that he invited him to Camp David for tips.

The early self-help books were all about how to be successful in business and finance, but now they are about how to be successful in all areas of life (though they have different definitions of success). Worried about your job, your marriage, your children, your health, your body shape, your lack of self-esteem, your clutter, your laziness, your loneliness, your inability to fulfil your dreams, your grief, the emptiness at the pit of your soul? Do we have the book for you …

Scott Pape's The Barefoot Investor was the top-selling book in Australia last year.

Advertisement

Australians have got in on the act, particularly in the field of relationships, with Stephanie Dowrick's series of books among the more thoughtful offerings, or Peter Charleston's Closer. And it's no coincidence that last year's top bestseller in Australia, Scott Pape's The Barefoot Investor, has the mantra "True happiness comes when you have control of your money". Self-help books are always on about true happiness, whatever that means.

There has been a backlash, but weirdly it's taken the form of yet more bestselling self-help books trying to tell us they are not self-help books at all. You can spot them by the f-words in the title, and sprinkled liberally through the pages. Sarah Knight counted up how many she'd used in one of her three jauntily rude books: "It's something like 732."

As with self-help books in general, the anti-self-help books range from the crass and silly to the genuinely helpful, possibly even wise. I haven't read Danish psychology professor Svend Brinkmann's Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, but it sounds pretty sensible. We're getting addicted to self-help, he says, and it isn't doing us any good.

So what does Brinkmann advocate? Cut out the navel-gazing. Focus on the negative. Put on your No hat. Suppress your feelings. Sack your coach. Dwell on the past. A typical self-help list of mantras to follow: but most of it is the opposite of advice you get in other books.

What does this obsession with self-help and self-improvement say about us and our times, at least in the more affluent pockets of the Western world? (Everybody else is too busy staying alive.) Alexandra Schwartz has done a good detailed survey and analysis of the phenomenon in The New Yorker, and though she's critical, she avoids that snide superior tone that literary people sometimes take on when talking about popular books.

The advice I like best from Brinkmann is: Read a novel – not a self-help book. Self-help books often reinforce the idea that life is something we control, he says. "Novels, on the other hand, enable you to understand human life as complex and unmanageable."